Bush Gored on Environment and More!

It's really good to see a high visiblilty political figure take Bush to task over utter contempt for the environment.

Gore Environmental Speech Becomes an Assault on Bush

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

Former Vice President Al Gore said yesterday that the Bush administration was "wholly owned by the coal, oil, utility and mining industries" and that President Bush was a "moral coward" for not standing up to his campaign contributors when their interests conflicted with those of the public.

Mr. Gore's speech in New York, billed as an attack on Mr. Bush's environmental record, proved to be a far broader critique.

The former vice president used environmental issues to highlight what he called moral failures and deceptions by the Bush administration.

"While President Bush likes to project an image of strength and courage, the real truth is that in the presence of his large financial contributors he is a moral coward, so weak that he seldom if ever says 'no' to anything, no matter what the public interest might mandate," Mr. Gore said to a standing ovation.

The speech, co-sponsored by the group MoveOn.org, was his fourth in a series that takes the administration to task while helping keep Mr. Gore in the nation's political dialogue. He is not a candidate for office, but he looked and sounded like one with a speech that blended humor with outrage.

The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Ed Gillespie, called Mr. Gore's remarks "political hate speech" and said in a statement: "Instead of repudiating these tactics, Al Gore chose to embrace the vile tactics that are becoming the hallmark of the Democrat Party at its highest levels.

"Like the Democrat presidential candidates, Al Gore has once again chosen to use his time at the podium to attack the president rather than put forward a positive agenda of his own."

But Mr. Gore appeared to give the crowd what it wanted. Organizers said they had distributed 3,500 tickets in just two hours via the Internet and despite frigid temperatures, the Beacon Theater on Broadway was packed. On several occasions Mr. Gore could hardly be heard above the applause.

The speech began as a familiar tutorial on climate and mankind, of the kind Mr. Gore has been giving for two decades. But it soon encompassed foreign policy and the president's recent proposal to try to build a base on the moon, which Mr. Gore called an "unimaginative and retreated effort." He accused the Bush White House of often operating in secret, of intentionally deceiving the public and of "radical changes that reverse a century of American policy designed to protect our natural resources."

Mr. Gore assailed Mr. Bush as having criticized the concept of "nation building" during the campaign in 2000 only to invade and occupy Iraq. He said Mr. Bush's promise as a candidate to regulate carbon dioxide as a polluting greenhouse gas "was instantly transformed by the inauguration into a promise to the generators of CO2 that it would not be regulated at all."

Mr. Gore's impassioned delivery prompted several people in the audience to remark afterward that had he been as forceful as a candidate in 2000, he might have won.

Doug Hattaway, Mr. Gore's national spokesman in 2000, said he believed that Mr. Gore was speaking out with one goal in mind: to help defeat Mr. Bush in 2004. "He is helping to add fuel to the fire and keep issues in the news that are problematic for the administration," Mr. Hattaway said.

But while Mr. Gore may have helped rally the Democratic faithful, the political cast to his speech drew concern that he might be undermining the very cause he said he was addressing.

"In many ways it is the politicization of the climate issue that has stifled discussions of new and innovative policy options," Roger Pielke Jr., director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado commented after reading the speech. "As opposing sides use the issue for political gain, it is very difficult for new ideas to enter the discussion. The politics is all well and good, but meanwhile we lack effective options on climate."

In this instance, there is no more at link. Why does the GOP and RWEC use the phrase. "politcal hate speech" with such frequency? The anwser is that they cannot point errors of fact and have nothing but vacuous retorts.

I agree that the specch would have been more effective if Gore stuck to hammering Bush on his utter recklessness regarding the environment.

However, the balance of his comments were essentailly factaul. You know that when Gillespie has to resort to the 'PHS' defense, that the GOP does not have any rebuttal.